Playing to Lose

During the summer Olympics of 2012, a total of four teams were disqualified in the badminton portion of the games for violating the rule of "fair play" . It was said that two South Korean pairs, one Indonesian pair, and one Chinese pair were purposely losing the matches to manipulate the knockout draw in the round-robin format, in order to earn a easier match up. It all started with the Chinese losing to Denmark in the preliminary round automatically leading them to the knockout round rather than the gold-medal round. Eventually both the Korean and Indonesian teams caught on and thought they too should purposely lose the game. The audience was not pleased to see such an awful game and to see the players effortlessly serving the birdie into the nets while laughing. Eventually, due to the booing from the audience, the referee stepped in and gave the players a warning of disqualification if the continued to play unfairly. Not long after, the four teams were disqualified.

 http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/london/story/2012-07-31/Badminton-players-charged-with-throwing-matches/56630488/1